Leading effective meetings in person is a learned skill, one that can be adapted to the remote environment with some help from best practices in digital pedagogy and, in particular, the principles of backward design. These best practices can improve meeting productivity, encourage interaction, and increase inclusion for colleagues in satellite locations. (C&RL News)
...students bring a wealth of lived experience to the classroom that our team sought to include in a lesson on critically evaluating information. We developed everyday information-seeking scenarios to discuss the contextual nature of information use and the concept of information appropriateness and fit. (C&RL News)
Launching and sustaining an OER initiative requires deep collaboration and investment at all institutional levels. Viable programs must include students as engaged participants and meaningful long-term partners. Maintaining student engagement over time can be a challenge, especially at the community college level, where transitory behavior is the norm and student turnover is more rapid. We hope our story will show you how to fuel the sparks of OE initiatives at your campus into a flame that lights a clear path to OE sustainability.
In fall 2019, the University of Wyoming (UW) Libraries launched an information and digital literacy badge and certificate program in partnership with the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning (ECTL), housed in the UW Libraries main branch. ECTL crafts programing and provides support for graduate students, staff, and faculty who teach on our campus by employing instructional designers.
The promotion of a library’s resources often relies on using its physical space with physical displays. With COVID-19, many libraries are either not physically open or their services have been modified where there are limitations with who or how many people are allowed to enter their buildings. Promoting areas in the collection may take on creative and new methods during the pandemic, including the use of virtual displays or online resource guides. Creating virtual displays can also become an opportunity to support and promote equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within the library and campus wide. (C&RL News)
Current teaching practice in undergraduate higher education anatomy and physiology courses incorporates the use of various instructional methodologies to reinforce the anatomical relationships between structures.1,2 These methods can include basic hands-on physical models, human and animal dissection labs, and interactive technology. Technological advances continue to drive the production of innovative anatomy and physiology electronic tools... (C&RL News)
CUNY librarians are talking about UnSub, a tool that "scours the web for versions of paywalled papers that are freely available on online repositories, preprint servers, and institutional databases, helping scholars circumvent paywalls legally." It has enabled large systems like SUNY to cancel big journal "deals" with Elsevier and save tens of thousands of dollars. (Science Magazine)
[The pandemic’s pedagogical shifts] prompted many professors to rethink the way they teach. They’ve pared down assignments, covered less content, spent less time lecturing, given more-authentic assessments, and provided more flexibility around grades. They’ve decided what’s most essential for students to get from a course and found a way to make it possible. Those changes were made under duress. But in many cases, professors have found, they turned out to be improvements.
In this mixed-methods study, librarians at Kennesaw State University Library System conducted a year-long design research project to create a flexible subject guide “blueprint” for undergraduate students using LibGuides….The study’s goals were to identify what content, aesthetic design, organization, and structure students preferred on a subject guide.
Virginia's Community Colleges (VCCS) and California Community College Library Chat (CCCLC) have two layers to their cooperative – first, their own network of local librarians that answer student questions within their consortium – plus additional help from the Springshare 24/7 Global Chat Cooperative’s (Co-Op) dedicated Academic Global Cooperative with its team of librarians. (Springshare)
Digital collections serve as one of the many vehicles for cultural heritage institutions to highlight and display digitized material from special and curated collections. Many institutions have long relied on fair use to make digitized content from their collections openly available online. In recent years, after researching collections, some institutions have specifically distinguished public domain content. These institutions took time and resources to enhance their digital collections with rights information. Reassessing and identifying rights status is worth the time and resources because providing this metadata allows visitors to make informed decisions about reuse. (College & Research Libraries News)
As part of the profession’s ongoing efforts to integrate information literacy into the curriculum, some librarians have taken an approach centered on teaching disciplinary faculty to teach information literacy. Indeed, some have argued that the best way for librarians to ensure that students are developing information literacy is to focus primarily on faculty, rather than on providing instruction to students. Although most librarians do not seem prepared to stop all direct instruction to students, there are many examples of libraries offering faculty development programming. While many of these programs involve face-to-face interactions between librarians and disciplinary faculty, there are examples of librarians creating online information literacy workshops or courses for faculty. (College & Research Libraries News)
Developing campus-wide programs to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion continues to be an ongoing priority for many colleges and universities across the country. Academic libraries are well positioned to support this work because they are embedded in so many of the functions of their institutions. Moreover, academic library staff have been writing about and practicing critical information literacy and intersectional feminist pedagogy in service of creating spaces in which all patrons can learn and grow. For example, the Oberlin Group, of which Wellesley College is a member, has collaboratively drafted a guide specifically for aggregating resources that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries. (College & Research Libraries News)